How to Stop Time

I never tired of the way birds moved when they weren't in flight. It was a series of tableaux rather than continuous movement. Staccato. Stuck moments.

It was like being stuck in the same song, with a chorus you had once liked but now made you want to rip your ears off.

‘The past is never gone. It just hides.’

'Well, I love music. I love playing music. But I'd find it a hard thing to teach. I've always found it hard to talk about music.’

Even though I hadn't seen Rose since 1603 the love was still there, exactly as strong, and now it was hurting. It was hurting more than any physical pain could try to.

Reading Schopenhauer when you felt melancholy was like taking off your clothes when you felt cold

'Possibility is everything that has ever happened. The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that—and we shall—there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is .’

I don't know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken.

They probably weren't. But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.

It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn't just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.